Electronic devices running applications manage permissions for applications to access the electronic devices' resources, such as the devices' cameras or microphones. The management of such permissions may be defined according to a permission set at the time of the application's installation on the electronic device or at a subsequent runtime. The initially set permission may create opportunities for the application to access resources under circumstances unforeseen or undesired by the user at the time the permission was initially set by a user. For example, a user of a mobile terminal may, at the time of installing a social media application, grant the application permission to access the mobile terminal's microphone, on the assumption that the application would only access the microphone when the social media application was open and actively being used by the user. However, in some cases, the application may abuse this permission and access the microphone under unwanted circumstances, such as while the application is only running as a background process, which can result in undesirable breaches of a user's privacy, for example, recording the user's conversations without her permission.